Myriad Universes: Star Trek: The New Voyages

At first glance, something like Star Trek: The New Voyages might raise a few red flags. It's a two-volume (though more were planned) fanfiction compilation professionally published under the Bantam Star Trek line edited by Gene Roddenberry and convention regulars Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Immediately, one wants to angrily declare that fanfiction does not require professional validation and is a perfectly legitimate art form in its own right and something like this is only going to lead to a slippery slope where fanfic writers will be competing with each other for places in an artificially constructed hierarchy of credentials.

But in practice, that's not how Star Trek: The New Voyages reads at all (...at least at first, but we'll get to that). Instead, this is, rather heartwarmingly, nothing short of an unabashedly warm embrace by the Star Trek production team of the fanfiction community and a firm declaration that this is who Star Trek is really for and with whom the future of the franchise ultimately lies. Gene Roddenberry's introduction to the first volume is quite simply one of my favourite things he's ever written: Naturally, he positions himself as the creator from whom all of Star Trek springs from and claims the Original Series was “...not a one-man job, although it was something very personal to me-my own statement of who and what this species of ours really is, where we are now and something of where we may be going”. This is somewhat difficult to swallow knowing about the contributions of Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana and Roddenberry's own off-the-record statements about how Star Trek is really “just mini Biblical tales”, but hey, it's Roddenberry and we expect him to say something like this. What we, or at least I, did *not* expect Roddenberry to say is what comes after.

“We were particularly amazed when thousands, then tens of thousands of people began creating their own personal Star Trek adventures. Stories, and paintings, and sculptures, and cookbooks. And songs, and poems, and fashions. And more. The list is still growing. It took some time for us to fully understand and appreciate what these people were saying. Eventually we realized that there is no more profound way in which people could express what Star Trek has meant to them than by creating their own very personal Star Trek things.

Because I am a writer, it was their Star Trek stories that especially gratified me. I have seen these writings in dog-eared notebooks of fans who didn’t look old enough to spell 'cat.' I have seen them in meticulously produced fanzines, complete with excellent artwork. Some of it has even been done by professional writers, and much of it has come from those clearly on their way to becoming professional writers. Best of all, all of it was plainly done with love.

Good writing is always a very personal thing and comes from the writer’s deepest self. Star Trek was that kind of writing for me, and it moves me profoundly that it has also become so much a part of the inner self of so many other people.

Viewers like this have proved that there is a warm, loving, and intelligent life form out there.-and that it may even be the dominant species on this planet.

That is the highest compliment and the greatest repayment that they could give us.”

(Roddenberry also says if he could go back he'd make Star Trek “hotter”, but that's beside the point.)

This speak volumes, as does Sondra Marshak's later declaration that “It can be called 'fan fiction.' It is that, but it is more than that; it is simply Star Trek fiction.” and “...they are real Star Trek, written with care and love, faithful to the sunlit universe in which the Enterprise still flies on these voyages to strange new worlds”. And this tone permeates absolutely everything in the book, and the introductions the cast members offer to each individual story are equally as beautiful as Marshak's and Roddenberry's. My favourites are the ones by Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, DeForest Kelley and William Shatner, each of whom talk about, in their own way, how touched they are by the effect their work has had on people and how humbled they are to be part of something that's inspired, uplifted and brought joy to so many people.

(Shatner's essay in particular is a punching-the-air moment for me: He had such a reputation during this period of being a fan hater weirded out by Trekker culture, to the point he even poked fun at it with his tongue-in-cheek book Get a Life!. Clearly though, he was just as aware as anyone else of the effect Star Trek had on people and its capacity for material social progress.)

At the risk of slipping into the exact same platitudes I criticized Captain Kirk for in Star Trek: Year Four-The Enterprise Experiment, the reason I quote The New Voyages so much, and in particular the first volume, is that it is so eminently quotable and is so perfectly, essentially Star Trek. This is pretty much everything I adore about the franchise wrapped up in one concise little package and it's gotten to the point where I'm not sure I could talk this book up any better than the authors and editors themselves did. It's a triumphant reassurance that Star Trek belongs to everybody, but especially fanfic writers, and that it's fanfic writers who keep the story and the myth of Star Trek alive even when there's no Star Trek television show on the air.

Of course, all the highlighted fanfic authors in this volume are women, and, of course, all of their stories are utterly fantastic. They're so good, in fact, they easily outclass anything that was on either the Original Series or the Animated Series. “Ni Var”, for example, is basically “The Enemy Within” done right, splitting Spock into a pure Vulcan and a pure Human half and examining how it's in fact his duality that defines him and what makes him a good friend to Kirk and McCoy. “The Enchanted Pool”, though a bit rocky in its depiction of Spock, is on the whole a terrific fusion of a character piece about Spock's reluctance to engage in a romantic relationship with a rumination on Star Trek's connection to magick and faery myth (I won't spoil the huge twist ending, but suffice to say the one-off character introduced in this story is incredibly memorable and worth paying close attention to). Indeed, even Marshak and Culbreath themselves liken Star Trek to the Arthurian mythos.

“Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited” and “The Face in the Barroom Floor” are both light comedy pieces, the former being the obligatory “The actors get transported to a universe where their show is real” story and the latter being a straight comedy of errors where Kirk accidentally ends up implicated in a barroom brawl and arrested on shore leave. The second volume even has a simultaneously ridiculous and charming story called “Surprise!” written by Nichelle Nichols no less, about Spock and Uhura's tribulations trying to plan Kirk's birthday party (and that, somewhat wonderfully, posits Uhura and Nichols herself as an exasperated mother figure looking after “a ship full of little boys”). Once again, these are stories that couldn't have been done on the Original Series because they're too low-stakes: If nothing gets blown up or nobody gets punched, it's not going to make good sci-fi TV. But the characters and setting lend themselves very well to this kind of story, and it's often the little humorous moments that prove to be the most revealing and most essentially human.

This touches on larger truth Star Trek: The New Voyages grasps about its parent franchise and genre fiction as a whole. One of the things that makes these stories so very good is that the authors intimately grasp the humanness of these characters and these situations and aren't afraid to put that front and centre. We can have entire stories built solely around the relationship between Kirk and Spock, or Spock and McCoy, or Kirk and Uhura, or Kirk and Chapel and not have it feel voyeuristic or forced because these are human (or near-human) people doing human things with each other (in more ways then one: Practically every story is either predicated on or ends on a scene of *extremely* blatant slashing, even, delightfully, Nichols' own, and the editors are clearly *totally* on board with this). By and large, the New Voyages stories are incredibly low-key affairs about how people get along in Star Trek's universe and how its idealism manifests in day-to-day life, and that is so incredibly refreshing to read.

*But*, and there always manages to be a but, things start to go off the rails a bit in the second volume. Whereas Volume 1 came out into a world where there hadn't been a Star Trek show in two years, Volume 2 came out into one where Star Trek: The Motion Picture had just been announced and the Space Shuttle Enterprise had been launched. Star Trek was no longer the same franchise, and predictably, though painfully, where Volume 1 read like a love letter to the fanfic writers and the production team passing the torch to them, Volume 2 reads like a PR spot for NASA. Marshak and Culbreath go on and on about how NASA is Star Trek's vision given life in the real world (which it absolutely isn't) and how wonderful it is that Star Trek is coming back in a filmic form. While they do try to stress that the new movie is only going to be one more piece of the evolving tapestry of Star Trek and that the franchise really belongs to its fans, it doesn't feel quite as sincere or as convincing this time. Something's definitely changed, and not entirely for the better.

Furthermore, the stories themselves are a mixed bag this time, and this is very clearly due to there being only two or three fanfic writers spotlighted. Nichols' story is of course brilliant, but it's the only real standout this time. I had been really excited to read “The Patient Parasites” by Russel Bates, co-author of “How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth” once I found out it had been included in this compilation, but, upon reading it, it seems clear why D.C. Fontana passed it over. It's not that it's a poor story-Far from it; it's a perfectly deft execution of the Original Series formula where Kirk talks down a single-minded robot who has been programmed to search the galaxy for knowledge, absorb it and bring it back to its “patient” masters so they don't actually have to create anything of their own. But that's sort of the problem: It's almost *too* generic a Star Trek story.

It also certainly doesn't help that Bates intended to use this story to introduce the character of Dawson Walking Bear and then changed his mind. Bates says he swapped Walking Bear out for Sulu in this story, and that's *literally* what he did: Had this been written today I would have accused Bates of doing a find-and-replace with the words “Walking Bear” and “Sulu”, because absolutely nothing Sulu does in this story is in keeping with his established character. There's even a scene where Scotty says “the young lieutenant would like to earn his keep”, as if Sulu hadn't served on the Enterprise for at least five years already by this point and one where he has Sulu mention how his ancestors wouldn't be pleased with using an artificial eclipse to shut off the robot's power supply because they saw them as bad omens, which is first of all not even accurate in the context of either the Japanese *or* the Native Americans, and secondly never something Sulu would actually say.

And this is all too bad, because, while it may be a generic Star Trek story “The Patient Parasites” is also a perfectly functional one. There was no need for Bates to remove Walking Bear from this story: In fact, a case could be made he would have fit right in because in some respects this is very much a story that does indeed come from a Native American perspective, and it's a bit sad that D.C. Fontana didn't seem to notice this. Kirk's argument about why the robot's designers are in the wrong is because, as technological and ideological parasites, they only take from others and never give anything back, and it's not too hard to interpret this as something we might expect from a Native American positionality.

As William Cronon argues in his social history Changes in the Land, while it's a fallacy to claim that Native Americans lived in perfect harmony with an unspoiled land prior to the arrival of European colonizers, what they were able to manage was a way of making subtle changes to the land that didn't disrupt the environment. In essence, they didn't take more than they needed and recognised that living in a healthy give-and-take relationship with the environment was better for everyone. Essentially, what Bates is saying here, albeit translated into a Roddenberry-esque Original Series moral atom bomb. Unfortunately, this also means “The Patient Parasites” is considerably less creative and groundbreaking a story than the fanfiction highlighted elsewhere in The New Voyages.

However the real problem child of New Voyages Volume 2 is Marshak and Culbreath's own “The Procrustean Petard”. It sounds like it's going to be a really interesting and provocative setup: Lured to a former recreation planet by a false distress signal, the crew of both the Enterprise and Commander Kang's battlecruiser get gender swapped by having their chromosomes altered, with the exception of Spock and Kang, who get double-Y chromosomes and become, essentially, hyper-masculine. The rest of the story involves both crews trying to deal with the ramifications of the new status quo and find a way to change themselves back.

As intriguing as that premise is though, very quickly it starts to become painfully obvious that this story is everything people accuse “Turnabout Intruder”of being, which is rather shocking coming from two female writers: The crew, especially Kirk, spends the majority of the story bemoaning the dysphoria of their situation, which would be alright (and accurate) if it wasn't limited exclusively to the crewmembers turned female saddened at becoming physically and emotionally weaker and more vulnerable (not to mention the fact that this reads Kirk herself completely wrong, but that's another story): The women who get turned into men get scenes where they revel in their newfound strength and power, and there's even a female security officer who decides to stay male because “it's a better form for her chosen profession”, which is...just...yuck. And furthermore, there's not a single male crewmember who decides to stay a woman, which really hurts. I mean I don't expect 1978 Star Trek to grasp things about transgender issues fiction *today* can't even get right, but this would have been the absolute perfect platform to talk about them and the story just completely misses the boat on every single interesting direction it could possibly have gone.

Likewise, this would have been a wonderful opportunity to explore how gender roles manifest in Star Trek and how this compares with the way they work in the real world, but Marshak and Culbreath do *absolutely nothing* with this, instead focusing on how nobody will take Kirk seriously as a commander anymore in the body of a beautiful woman, which makes zero sense even given the way the Star Trek universe works already. At *least* in “Turnabout Intruder” the dilemma was over the fact that Kirk wasn't legally allowed to take command of a starship as a woman and how unjust that law was: This story seems to *actually be saying* that women are the “weaker sex”, inherently inferior in high-performance jobs like working on a Starship and how tragic that is. And no matter which way you cut it, that's simply not the Star Trek way.

(That's not to say Marshak and Culbreath don't know how to have a little fun: The best part of this story, and frankly its only redeeming feature, is its extremely strong implication that everyone in the crew is off having incredibly hot sex with each other off-camera because they're so taken aback by what knockouts they've all become and they finally have the ability to appreciate, and act on, the love and beauty they see in one another. Even turning the Enterprise into a lesbian orgy isn't enough to save this one.)

What we see in Star Trek: The New Voyages then is a perfect microcosm of the split in Star Trek fandom: The first volume wears how indebted it is to the fanfic writers on its sleeve: Indeed, it can be seen as an official acknowledgment and adoption of the overwhelmingly female fanzine structure and culture that defined Star Trek fandom in the 1970s. The second volume, however, shows the less savoury side of the franchise: The top-down, technologistic side that would much prefer to cozy up to (and sell out to) NASA and the aerospace engineering sector for a cross-promotional deal with the shiny new bit of branded Star Trek Soda Pop Art rather than engage with the people who are actually trying to internalize Star Trek's idealism and act on it on an everyday basis. And this is pretty much how the fandom is going to remain divided, at least until Nerd Culture comes along (but even now it's rather clear where Nerd Culture is going to spring from).

But, the original message of The New Voyages remains as clear now as it ever was. This is Star Trek, through its original creative team, finally recognising and embracing the things that people (particularly female people) loved about it, and loved about it enough to keep it alive almost a decade later. As Nichelle Nichols says (and here I go quoting people again):

“We have come a long way since the last of the old voyages...We still have a long way to go. But I see people working to get there. (It is significant that many of them are women; for example, the writers and editors of these stories.) So long as we are still working, writing, talking, thinking, loving, we are under way on warp drive to the world and the future we want.

These are the new voyages….

And they may be just a little different.”

Ship's Log, Supplemental: A Fragment Out of Time

Slash fiction is a thread that's been with us for quite some time already, and it's been with Star Trek arguably since as early as “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Although certain hardcore fans might not like to admit it, it is unquestionably one of the franchise's most defining and signature motifs: Although slash has existed for pretty much as long as people have been telling stories, the current manifestation of it, the interaction it has with late-20th and early-21st century fan culture, and thus the way it is commonly conceptualized today, can be directly traced back to Star Trek.

There are any number of possible opportunities to discuss slash over the course of the franchise's history, but the one that seems to most appropriate is here, with the first documented piece of Star Trek-inspired slash fiction, Diane Marchant's “A Fragment Out of Time” (Page 1, Page 2), dating to 1974. Marchant submitted it to one of the first (and at the time only) Star Trek zines targeted expressly towards adults, a publication somewhat wonderfully titled Grup. Given the zine's comparatively small audience and interviews she's given after the fact, Marchant never expected it to be the bombshell it ended up becoming.

However I think she really needn't be ashamed, because the piece itself is, perhaps contrary to what one might expect, really quite tame and laudably well-written, describing a night of passionate lovemaking between two parties of whom great care is taken to speak in vagaries (though an accompanying illustration, not to mention the fact it was published in a Star Trek zine, sort of makes it obvious who the two paramours are supposed to be). And “lovemaking” really is the proper term: Marchant is very clearly interested in the intimacy and tenderness shared by her protagonists, and the gentle, poetic tone that permeates the entire piece reflects this. Honestly, as far as slash fiction goes, or really erotica in general, you could do considerably worse for yourself than this.

Like so much fanfiction of its era, Marchant wrote “A Fragment Our of Time” largely as an experiment. However, she also always maintained that she didn't come up with the idea of shipping Kirk and Spock herself, she was merely responding to what she felt was blatant subtext in the original Star Trek and that everyone who watched the show recognised and acknowledged to one degree or another, regardless of whether or not they actually admitted it. Marchant was adamant that the only thing she contributed to the history of Star Trek and the broader fan culture was the first work that was bold enough to put it into words, and I'm more than reasonably convinced she was right.

There was, of course, (and still is, to some extent) some manner of controversy over this opinion. The popular consensus for what happened next (I mean as much as there can be consensus about something as understudied and undervalued as fanfiction) is that “A Fragment Out of Time” caused a great schism amongst Star Trek fans and a firestorm of a debate about how proper the fic itself was and whether Marchant's argument was convincing or not. It would be altogether too easy for me to draw the line between, well, not necessarily fanboys and fangirls, but let's say patriarchal proto-nerd culture and feminist fandom, but it's not quite as simple as that. Remember the vast majority of the invested parties here are still women, including some of Marchant's staunchest critics, like one Connie Faddis, who penned an extremely negative review of “A Fragment Out of Time” and who would go on to be a pioneering figure in the Kirk/Spock scene herself.

But perhaps the most damning evidence that slash fiction didn't cause a huge rift in Star Trek fandom circa 1974 or emerge with the uncomfortable connotations it maybe has nowadays comes from our friend Paula Smith. When questioned about her views on erotic Star Trek stories (or if you prefer straight-up Star Trek pornography) at a convention, Smith gave this sparkling reply (emphasis hers):

“I agree that ST pornography is a lousy thing -- it is so badly written. In search for titillating themes, good or even credible characterization is ignored, and plots degenerate to the simplest push-push gimmickry. A lousy Get-Together story is worse than a lousy Mary-Sue story, because the reader doesn't expect a Mary-Sue necessarily to be any good. If it is uneven, juvenile, or just plain silly, that is typical, and the reader is not disappointed. But when a reader takes up a story on an adult theme, she expects an adult treatment, or ought to. A simpering, or brutal treatment of sex is evil in a most fundamental sense, because such trivializes and degrades our greatest humanity -- love. But sex, and sexuality, per se are not dirty and disgusting.”

Furthermore, when asked specifically about slash during her tenure as editor of the zine S and H when it was at its absolute peak as a debate topic, Smith responded, at once guarded, cheekily and triumphantly

“Some folks are hobbits: they need to be aware there are wider vistas than that of Bag End. Some are wizards: they must take care not to strike and blast as forcibly as they feel like, because there is always some fuzz-footed clown out there just itching to swipe yer Ring. The most useful thing anyone can learn is when to shut up. Like now.”

which I think is just hilarious, as she has documented Starsky and Hutch BDSM slash fanfic to her name.

So if slash is something Star Trek fandom at large circa 1974 seems on-the-whole comfortable with and the only real new ground Marchant is breaking is putting everyone's unspoken assumptions into textual form, the question then becomes, what was it about the original Star Trek that made it so easy for widespread and near-universal slashing to happen to the point a significant majority of fans seemingly took it for granted? We briefly talked about this back in the post on “And The Children Shall Lead”, but, to elaborate, Star Trek in general, though particularly the original series, exists at a unique junction of events and factors that make the evolution of slash an almost predictably logical outcome in retrospect. We've discussed at length one of the primary reasons why, which is that Star Trek was, even amongst the notoriously puritanical climate of US television, heavily sexually repressed and confused.

Gene Roddenberry never did quite manage to get a handle on how to handle writing women and approaching gender roles, even though he does get considerably better at it come Star Trek: The Next Generation. The closest he's gotten so far has been “Turnabout Intruder”, which was still ludicrously problematic and the fact it worked to the extent it did when it did was primarily due to William Shatner and Sandra Smith. Her employing Margaret Armen aside, D.C. Fontana gets it, though she prefers to demonstrate her feminism in far more subtle ways that work within the framework Star Trek already established for itself.

And yet Star Trek has proven to be wildly popular with women-So much so that literally none of the fan literature and history I've been able to dig up about this era even mentions the fact that men probably watched the show too, unless you count the most likely at-least-partially staged “Save Star Trek!” campaign and its strong technoscience undertones. This is self-evidently because, at least on the surface, Star Trek claims to envision a world where differences between genders no longer matter. That alone is an incredibly powerful declaration, and, in my opinion, may be the single most important thing about the entire franchise.

But even aside from its embrace of feminism (as tentative and clunky as it may often be), Star Trek has always been quite sexy and sexual, and I don't mean because the women wore miniskirts in the 1960s and 1970s and there are a lot of one-off alien ladies. Spock is simply way too easy to read this way, I mean “Amok Time” alone practically demands it. He's a very sexually repressed and conflicted character, and whether or not Roddenberry meant for his inner struggle between logic and sensuality to be a metaphor for that, it works too well to ignore (although it's also worth remembering D.C. Fontana has attempted to correct this not once, but twice: First in “Journey to Babel” and then, more blatantly and effectively, in “Yesteryear”). Either way, because of this conflict and repression, it's especially easy to see Spock as in some sense a closeted character, as the closet is all about keeping up appearances that are really a facade to disguise the way you truly view yourself.

Then there's Kirk, or perhaps I should say William Shatner. Kirk as written, at least early on, is flatly not terribly interesting. He's a generic leading man. But Shatner, being firstly an extremely talented theatre actor and secondly someone who immediately recognised how overstuffed and pretentious Roddenberry had made Star Trek, from the very beginning set about trying to knock the show down a few pegs and get it to loosen up. So Shatner deliberately overacts, playing Kirk not at all straight, but as a kind of subtly exaggerated caricature. Subtly exaggerated caricature, or in other words “playing a role and getting it ever-so-slightly-wrong”, is also something that is sometimes associated with gay male culture because, as best I understand it, calling attention to one's own artifice was something that, at least at one time, could be used as a kind of secret language with which members of an underground and oppressed culture could communicate with each other (in fact, the connection between gay male culture and theatrical performativity may even be where get “straight” a synonym for heterosexual).

Now this is not at all to suggest Shatner or Nimoy were playing their characters gay per se (although if I recall correctly there was a point I think in the third season of the original series where both actors have gone on record basically admitting they started to do precisely this and were stunned it took people decades to figure it out. I mean it sure is hard to read at least “And The Children Shall Lead”, “Spock's Brain” and “Turnabout Intruder” any other way), it's just that the way Nimoy wound up conceiving of Spock and the way Shatner played Kirk ended up paralleling very nicely with things that were also considered part of gay male culture at one point. That aside, another reason it became so easy to ship Kirk and Spock was because, well, they were really the only characters who were allowed to express their emotions to one another.

The primary reason for this was network standards and practices. Ostensibly the leading man, Kirk wasn't allowed to actually become emotionally intimate with any women (even Janice Rand, who was originally supposed to be Kirk's closest confidant) as there could be absolutely no implication of anything untoward going on off-camera, because this was still an era where sex was still largely seen as obscene by at least the people paying the salaries of the cast and crew. This is the real reason Kirk had to be “married to the ship and the job”, although some of that may have come from Roddenberry too (though I doubt too much of it, given his relationship with Majel Barrett). This is also why so many of the female guest stars seemed disposable and interchangeable because, well, they were. This meant that if the show wanted to have any actual character moments in between the stupid fight scenes, they had to be between the supposedly very heterosexual and virile close friends. Of course, given the way Nimoy and Shatner played their characters, this was not entirely successful in dissuading assumptions about the crew getting busy with each other in their off-hours.

So we have two characters who are built out of theatrical tropes that were also associated with at least a part of gay male culture at one point and the only people they can be emotional, honest and intimate with is each other. Kirk said she was closer to Spock than anyone else in the universe in “Turnabout Intruder” for a reason, because, from a narrative standpoint, that's literally, actually the case. That's the exact logic the show works by. I mean, you do the math: How do you think fans were going to read that? Believe it or not, they tend to be a rather savvy bunch. Savvier, I daresay, then studio and network executives. But that said, there's another side to this: In spite of all the overtures we can make to gay male culture, slash fiction remains if not the exclusive domain of, at least very strongly associated with, straight women.

It is an unspoken, though widely held, belief in the pop consciousness that straight women are overwhelmingly interested in gay male erotica. That's not to say gay men don't indulge in it themselves, but so do straight women, and enthusiastically so. And the thing about a lot of slash, including “A Fragment Out of Time”, is that it is, counterintuitively, actually very strongly heteronormative, or at least heterosexual and heteroerotc. There was a Tumblr post making the rounds awhile back as of this writing that summarised the phenomenon quite well: The author made the point that the vast majority of the most famous and beloved slash pairings consisted of a light-haired, gregarious, outgoing “badass” character and a quieter, more reserved dark-haired character who frequently plays the support role to his partner. Most recently, you can see this manifest in Dean Winchester and Castiel in Supernatural and Merlin and Arthur in the 2005 BBC Merlin, and in fact it seems to have become so ubiquitous it seems to have been a deliberate casting choice on the part of the latter show specifically to encourage the slashers. Others, like Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' Sherlock and Weda's The Hobbit trilogy, seem to invert and play with this archetype for a variety of reasons. The author then goes on to trace this trend all the way back to what's seen as the pioneering, archetypical slash pairing: Kirk and Spock.

Now, this makes going back and re-reading “A Fragment Out of Time” interesting, because Kirk is very clearly portrayed as the dominant, “masculine” sexual partner, and Spock the submissive, “feminine” one, as it's his reactions that are depicted in the most flowery and voyeuristic detail. Even if you extrapolate this out to non-sexual slash, this pattern holds: There always tends to be an energetic “masculine” half of the pairing and a reserved, demure, supportive, “feminine” half. The whole idea of dominant and submissive power structures in sexual relationships, and the further conflation of this with “male” and “female” poles is extremely heteronormative. Yes, Western society is *so* patriarchal and misogynistic that even a power structure this heteronormative is paradoxically only acceptable if it's shown being acted out by two gay men because it conveniently cuts the bothersome woman out of the picture.

Now this is not to say that slash isn't just as much about storytelling as it is sexuality: After a point, it just starts to make strong narrative sense to ship Kirk and Spock given a lot of the textual evidence on display and the inarguably talented writing pool in the K/S scene were right to point that out in my view. Even Marchant herself recognised this. But I do think a portion of the appeal of slash, at least as far as I can tell, lies within the very traditionally and stereotypical Western heterosexual (albeit traditionally stereotypically Western heterosexual female) fantasy of one person coming in and, through doting support, rehabilitating and healing another, or at least being swept up by a powerful masculine force. It's the exact same reason Twilight was so wildly successful, as this is precisely the way Bella and Edward's relationship worked. Slash isn't so much GLBTQ detournement as much as it is detournement by straight cis women who are trying to find ways to be emotionally validated in an overwhelmingly patriarchal culture whose media artefacts have an unsettling tendency to pretend they don't exist.

This is not, of course, to dismiss slash as necessarily retrograde. I think it serves a very important purpose and as long as Westernism continues to hold such backwards and convoluted attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and so long as Westernism continues to be the dominant intellectual framework for popular discourse, stuff like slash is bound to crop up. I'm just not entirely convinced it's quite as radically queer as I sometimes see it made out to be. It's just like what we learned in “Amok Time”: Everyone has a sexual side (even if for some that sexual side is “null and void”), and trying to pretend it doesn't exist is unhealthy and counterproductive. It's going to manifest somewhere in some form. And we live in a culture where any sexuality other than that of the stereotypically virile heterosexual cis male dom is considered shocking and forced underground. Maybe it's best, and fitting, for us to learn from and share with each other and use our shared marginal positionalities to recognise this.

Ship's Log, Supplemental: A Trekkie's Tale

Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It's Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie's Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie's Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it's had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie's Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie's Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie's Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie's Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don't like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What's the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It's an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person. But that's not what Lieutenant Mary Sue does (indeed, the fact Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the others are largely incidental to her story is the whole point of it) and it's not what Star Trek fans seem to want either: Instead, they want their own personal slice of the Star Trek universe to themselves and they want it to revolve around them, or at least to explore it on their terms. It's the entire point of things like the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas or the video games Star Trek Starship Creator, Star Trek Bridge Commander and Star Trek Online.

So, despite how much the fans will talk up Star Trek's commitment to strong character development, it seems that when the cards are down they're ultimately going to default to projecting themselves onto the show. To me this is very interesting and unusual, if for no other reason than it doesn't match up with my own personal history of Star Trek fandom at all. This was never a fantasy that ever would have crossed my mind for a moment: What I always liked about Star Trek was its sense of wonder and exploration, the familial atmosphere the crew shared with each other and the characters themselves. I admired Jadzia Dax and Tasha Yar, saw them as role models and wanted to be like them, so a lot of my experience with Star Trek consists of looking up to people like that and trying to learn from them to better myself, and to, in a sense, take a little bit of them into me. From my perspective, that's as fundamentally, purely Star Trek as it gets, but it seems like my emotions aren't shared by fandom at large in this case.

But the other thing that defines my experience with Star Trek is wanting to write my own version of it, and for that there is a precedent. Here's where the other half of “A Trekkie's Tale” comes into play and, for my money, it's the more interesting half. So, if we're going to get anything remotely near an understanding of what these five little paragraphs actually are and how they fit into the history of Star Trek (as opposed to merely the way people have responded and interpreted them), we need to establish some simulacrum of context. By this point in the mid-1970s, Star Trek fandom was largely clustered around a series of fan-published and distributed zines. In the 1960s, the fan culture around the show, despite how loyal and vocal it had been, was still largely a disperse mainstream phenomenon. By the 1970s with the Original Series in syndication and hardly anyone watching the Animated Series (or at least hardly anyone seemingly willing to write and talk about it), Star Trek fandom was now very definitively a niche thing, with the first proper Star Trek convention (that is, separate from larger science fiction conventions) taking place in 1972.

As such, the 1970s Star Trek fandom comprised mainly two different factions: Middle-aged women who had been general science fiction fans in the 1950s and 1960s and remembered when Star Trek first started and the scene people like Bjo Trimble belonged to (and that Gene Roddenberry overtly tried to court), and younger college-aged women who were just getting exposed to the show through syndicated reruns. Both groups were very much interested in writing their own Star Trek stories, and there was such a surplus of them the zines had trouble keeping track of them all. So a situation arose where fans would be inspired by zines and cons to write, thus necessitating the need for more zines and cons so the cycle continued to self-perpetuate in perpetuity for awhile.

Back then, there was a stronger link between science fiction fans and science fiction writers than we might think would be the case today, perhaps a holdover from the days of the Golden Age conventions where readers and writers commingled and the dividing line between was quite blurry. It was not an unheard of scenario even as late as 1973 for science fiction authors to get their start writing for zines, and the fan culture sort of acted as an unofficial pipeline to more professional gigs. The problem was, of course, there was nowhere to go if you were writing about Star Trek, because the famous live-action show had been off the air for half a decade and, once again, nobody cared about the animated reboot. So you'd frequently get a lot of writers contributing a lot of really excellent, professional grade Star Trek stories as fanfic to zines because there was nothing else to do with them. Because of this, the fans introduced a kind of loose structure of their own, with zine editors oftentimes acting as a kind of surrogate script editor. One of the most prolific and influential of these semipro writers and editors was Paula Smith who, as it so happens, wrote the story we're talking about today.

Yes, shocking as it may seem, the person responsible for giving us the insecure femmephobic fan's favourite trump card is, in fact, a woman. It's at this point I'm probably expected to pull a Margaret Armen and take Smith to task for internalized misogyny issues, but I'm not going to because I actually don't think that's what's going on here. Like all works of satire (including Gulliver's Travels), “A Trekkie's Tale” has been badly, badly misinterpreted by generations of clueless readers who don't seem to get the joke. In fact, an even better point of comparison might be Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: Intended as a condemnation of wage slavery of migrant workers in the United States, which is helpfully and blatantly compared with the literal enslavement of Africans by that same country, history has largely proven itself to be the domain of white male middle class authoritarians by comprehensively missing the point and using it as a call-to-arms against lax heath code regulations in the meat packing industry. I feel something similar happened to Paula Smith.

The key to figuring out what I think Smith is actually saying here is to keep in mind her status as a kind of D.C. Fontana for fan culture. She was responsible for vetting hundreds upon hundreds of Star Trek fanfics and giving an innumerable amount of writers tips on how to hone their craft (actually, it was from interviews with her that I gleaned the majority of the historical information I use in this post). Indeed, one of the most classic, foundational maxims of fanfic, Langsam's Law, comes largely from her. It states that (in Smith's words)

“There is a special caveat for writing media-based fiction. Don't make an established character do or say something out of line with his established character, of if you must, give good, solid reasons why."

which is frankly just good writing advice in general as far as I'm concerned. This touches on the other side of the 1970s zine culture, which was that because Star Trek was off the air, and regardless as to whether or not they knew about the Animated Series, the fans sort of saw themselves as penning if not the official continuation of it, at least one semi-proper, semi-authorized version of it. So it would kind of make sense that these people would take good care to make sure their stories could plausibly have been Star Trek episodes themselves had the show not been canceled.

And this is the nut of “A Trekkie's Tale”, because what Smith is lampooning with Lieutenant Mary Sue is not women daring to write Star Trek fanfic, or introducing new female characters, or introducing female author avatar characters or even introducing new female characters who go on to be love interests for canon characters. What Smith is lampooning is bad writing in general. As many good editors often are, Smith was a prolific writer herself, penning countless fics (debatably literally so, since she used a different pseudonym practically every single time she wrote something, making her work a headache to track down today) for not just Star Trek, but also Starsky and Hutch, Harry and Johnny, The Professionals and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. She had written enough and been around the scene enough to know what worked and what didn't, and “A Trekkie's Tale” is her way of compiling and caricaturing the most egregious and problematic trends she noticed in an attempt to show new writers “Here: This is what not to do”.

And if we divert our attention momentarily from Mary Sue herself, who is indeed admittedly a veritable perfect storm of painful amateur writing mistakes exaggerated beyond infinity, it becomes obvious she's not the only thing we're supposed to pay attention to. The fic's dialog is stilted, repetitive and awkward, plot developments happen out of thin air, there's no sense of internal coherence or consistency, a general feeling the whole thing was banged out in a terrible rush and even the tense keeps jumping back and forth between past, present and future. Even the title “A Trekkie's Tale” itself is a dead giveaway, eschewing completely any and all pretenses that this is going to be anything remotely resembling a straightforward or recgonisable Star Trek story because, their obvious boundless energy and enthusiasm notwithstanding, this is something the writer has clearly put next to no effort into (not, it must be stressed, that this is entirely their fault, however: They're clearly too young and/or inexperienced to know any better). As the saying goes, it takes talent and skill to craft something this memorably awful.

So, while Smith did hold up the Mary Sue archetype as something to be avoided, unlike successive people who have appropriated the concept, she recognised it for what it was: One type of mistake among many that beginning writers have a tendency to make but that can be expunged through experience, guidance and support. But as noble as Smith's intentions with “A Trekkie's Tale” might have been, and I do think they were noble, the question remains: Has the story actually done what it was supposed to do and had a net positive effect on fandom such that it's help blossoming writers, fanfic or otherwise, to learn and develop their skills? Of that I'm not so sure, because the Mary Sue as it exists today is a terribly problematic concept loaded up with toxic connotations and, as is well known, a favourite silencing technique of the patriarchal hegemony. Decades of reactionary reappropriation have twisted and distorted the Mary Sue archetype into a misogynistic weapon.

It's an altogether too common story to hear female writers, even professional ones, confess that they consciously avoid having too many female characters in their cast or writing their women too strong or too independent out of a very serious and legitimate fear they'll be scorned and attacked for writing “Mary Sue stories” and will never be respected or recognised as proper writers (or even worse, have their careers completely destroyed outright) as a result. Anybody can write a character like Lieutenant Mary Sue, and such a character can be of any gender. But the “Mary Sue” archetype has become exclusively female and that's a problem. That does retroactively harm the original work and make me wonder whether the actual satire was ever all that clear to begin with. Because of that, I'm uncertain that Smith's original five paragraphs can now be taken apart from the tangible, material and very negative effect they had on female fans and writers, as riotously funny as those five paragraphs might be (and they are riotously funny: Phrases like "Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky”, “Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood” and “beautiful youth and youthful beauty” crack me up every single time).

But regardless of the quality of the actual story, let's make sure we don't damn the author as well. Good writers have bad days. We all do. The most important thing about Paula Smith is that she always kept trying no matter what: She wrote an incalculable number of stories, oftentimes just on a dare or as an attempt to do an experiment or proof-of-concept for just herself. Like anyone, she missed her target just as much, if not more, than she hit it. That's only called being a writer, after all. Because she was involved in zines and conventions to the extent she was and ran so much (and kept so much running), I'd call her showrunner of her own underground version of Star Trek. Hell, given the staggering scope of her fanfic resume even beyond Trek, Smith should probably be seen as someone just as seasoned as the most experienced TV writers and producers of her day. So, even if she did strike out with “A Trekkie's Tale”, it's ultimately one minor bump on the very long and winding path of a career that spans literally decades and frankly puts most professional writers to shame.

Paula Smith never gave up, never stopped trying to challenge and better herself and never let anyone stop her from writing what she loved. And I think that's the lesson she'd like her readers to take with them most of all.

Paula Smith keeps the Enterprise running at warp speed.